Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

— Alone, seated in a chair with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, his face lined with exertion-a young woman standing nearby. His woman? No visible sign of the second angel. On his way to the First Citadel?

Harper activated the Screamer. At the high frequency to which she had coaxed it, it emitted a blast of psychic energy so powerful as to compress the air around it. There was a flash, and the engineer’s own thoughts blanked.

Silence.

It took Menoa’s army a heartbeat to recover from the shock, but much longer for Forgotten to force them back into battle. Hasp’s demons no longer reacted to anything. They simply stood motionless and died under the claws of their former comrades.

Harper surveyed the battlefield. Menoa’s army had been mostly destroyed, with fully eight-tenths of the Legion of the Blind wounded or killed. Their corpses filled the quadrangle and all the surrounding canals. The survivors, perhaps no more than two hundred thousand demons, waded through the flooded channels, groping in the waters for lost eyes.

Forgotten flashed a sudden warning at Harper, and she wheeled.

The Lord of the First Citadel stood in one of the doorways of his ruined castle. Sword in hand, and clad in old battered armour, he gazed at the scene of devastation with an expression of weary sadness. Behind him, the remains of his fortress began to fade. In some places the fallen battlements and spires were already as thin as gas. In a nearby corner of the quadrangle a pack of twenty or so Blind sniffed the air, and then started to creep towards him. Hasp ignored them.

He addressed Harper. “You set off the Screamer?”

Slowly, the engineer tilted her glass head.

“Then you saved me some honour,” Hasp remarked. “We archons generally like to fight our own battles. How many of the Blind remain for me to kill?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

The god grunted. “Enough to make a good song of this day.”

“You know they won’t kill you.” Hasp would suffer a far worse fate than death. “Where is the angel who fell from Deepgate?”

“I slew him. His soul gave me the strength to rattle this little army of Menoa’s.”

She knew he was lying, but said nothing. Her sceptre would soon locate her quarry.

The god extended his wings, now thin and ragged and clogged with grime. He took a step forward on trembling legs. He could hardly stand upright. Then he scratched the tip of his sword through the pile of rubble on which he stood, sketching a line in the dust.

His eyes narrowed on Harper again. “I see a starving woman trapped inside that Mesmerist thing,” he said. “She wears the uniform of a Pandemerian engineer, but she doesn’t look happy to be in there.” With some effort he raised his sword. “Come here and I’ll set her free.”

Harper didn’t move. All around her the Legion of the Blind clambered over piles of their dead comrades as they crept nearer to the diminishing castle and the solitary archon standing in its doorway.

“Two hundred thousand!” Hasp yelled. Wincing in pain, he hefted his blade high over his head, spun it, and brought it crashing down through the skull of the nearest demon.

Then he staggered back and leaned against the doorway, sucking in desperate gulps of air. “That’s one,” he cried.

Clutching their rescued eyes, Menoa’s horde crawled closer.

Dill’s feathers were sodden and clogged with gore. He couldn’t now have flown even if he dared to risk it. He was slumped in a shallow pool, gasping for breath and gazing up at a black shape flitting across the sky.

Another one of Menoa’s spies?

Walls hemmed him in on three sides. He had found an alcove off one of the Maze’s countless canals. But there was no shade here. And no sanctuary. Faces peered out at him from the stonework.

Trust the walls, Hasp had said.

Dill found it hard to follow that advice. The Mesmerist dogcatchers seemed to pursue him wherever he hid. Most often they came when the mists grew dark, the time Dill had taken to calling night. He’d hear their clickety-clack teeth and he’d be forced to flee again, dragging his leaden legs through the sucking red fluid. It flowed always from the broken buildings, the ones the Icarates had smashed through.

Sometimes Dill crawled through the rooms the Mesmerists had destroyed and left empty, the shattered, bleeding houses and apartments-but the memories he had in those places weren’t his own, and they frightened him.

Where was Hasp now?

In the seven days since he’d fled, there had been no sign of the god or his castle. Had it only been seven days? Time had no meaning here. Often the days lasted much longer than they should have. He might have been running for a month, or a thousand years. The Legion of the Blind had not pursued him. Had they captured Hasp or presumed Dill to be dead?

Either way, there were other dangers.

A doorway was following him.

He had encountered it that morning. A rectangular gap between two square columns, it had seemed to offer a way through a wall separating two parallel canals. Pits in the stone lintel had the appearance of tiny eyes, while longer gouges opened and grinned like mouths. It had whispered to him as he passed.

Step through. Quickly, little crow.

Dill had stepped through only to find himself back where he had started. Somehow the doorway had turned him around. In his confusion, Dill had splashed a hundred yards along the canal before he realized he was retracing his own path. The doorway had laughed and slid along the wall until it was out of sight.

But now, as the shadow in the sky moved out of sight, he heard the doorway’s voice again. And it wasn’t speaking to him.

It’s up ahead. A hundred yards on the left. A little white crow. Follow me, hurry.

Dill peered out of the alcove. Three Icarates flanked a sphere of human bones which they rolled through the shallow waters between them. They were hurrying along the canal towards Dill’s hiding place. Their anemic armour fizzed and lit up faces in the surrounding dark stones, forcing ghosts to blink and look away. The doorway moved ahead of them, revealing flooded rooms and passages as it slid along the wall. Fluid gushed over its threshold like water over a weir.

There he is!

Returning to the open canal terrified Dill, but there was no other way out. He fled the alcove and ran from the Mesmerist priests and their sphere, thick fluids sucking at his feet.

The doorway raced ahead of the Icarates, zipping along the canal boundary wall until it reached Dill. It kept pace with him, and through it Dill saw yet more roofless ruins, canals, and sumps beyond the wall.

Step through me-I’ll help you to escape, it teased.

“Leave me alone.”

The doorway cackled wildly, then slid back along the wall the way it had come. Dill glanced over his shoulder. The Icarates were gaining on him.

The canal opened into a wide circular space. From here, dozens of narrower channels branched out in every direction. Dill chose one at random and hurried down it. The channel split in two; he took the right fork. A hundred paces further the passage divided again. Now Dill turned left. He tried to vary his route but keep his progress in the general direction of the First Citadel. Although he could not see the great building itself, the skies over it were dark with the smoke from King Menoa’s war machines.

Finally deep inside this labyrinth of channels, Dill ducked into another alcove, and slumped against the far wall, exhausted. For a long time he listened hard for the voice of the errant doorway.

Nothing.

But then he heard other sounds. From the other side of the wall came the rumble and splash of something rolling through shallow water, followed by the aetherlike crackle of Icarate armour.